Sunday Book Thread

Voegeli takes the rather surprising (for a conservative) position that the welfare-state in America is a fait accompli, and that the best course of action going forward is to simply limit how large it gets. It's rather a depressing book in that respect. The book does treat the liberal side of the argument carefully and seriously, which not many conservative books on this subject do, and it places the growth of the welfare-state into a broad historical context. This book expounds on a point I've made myself many times: we've all agreed long since that we're going to have a welfare-state; the question of whether to have one is off the table. The real question now is how big we want it to be, and how much we're willing to pay to maintain it.

Voegeli recently did an interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution's Uncommon Knowledge program. Here is the link.